Wednesday, December 9, 2015

WOW! Catching up!

So...yes, we've been busy again!

Arianna has had an initial evaluation with CDRC (Child Development and Rehabilitation Center) and was diagnosed ADHD (which we knew YEARS ago. lol), slight speech articulation issue (and we knew that, as both myself and her older brother went thru a year of speech therapy to correct similar issues) as well as Dyslexic/Dysgraphia/Learning diability. It was very interesting process and the Dr's impression was pretty close to what we knew.

"She is quick to learn, primarily when it is visually related or when information is presented to her orally." and the assessment stated " the more difficult the questions, the more she pays attention and the more answers she gets correctly (he only went up to 5th grade level I believe). Then he wrote that She was very vocal and carried on a conversation that was much higher than her chronological age.

So we are going to be working with the school district for more testing and evaluating her. We did get a recommendation for Bookshare.org which is a site for free audio books for students with learning disabilities with printed text. You do need a formal diagnoses but it is a wonderful resource for those that need it.

We also got all three kittens moved home and that has been an interesting and fun process! Arianna's kitten ignores everyone except her. She will sit with Arianna a lot, which actually helps Arianna settle down and keeps her sitting! She'll sit there and pet cupcake thru out a short film, or a discussion over a lesson, etc. The only time cupcake visits anyone else is when Arianna is gone for a sleep over at her friends house. Cookie, Kaitlyn's kitten, ignores us unless we pick him up. Then he will sit with us for awhile (where as cupcake will get away from us as soon as possible if we pick her up). Gumball should have come with a warning label. He likes to run down the hall, across the living room and launch himself onto your upper chest..Which causes a few cuss words on occasion because your not expecting it. He will also scoot as close to your face as possible to lick it then bite you..and he especially loves ears. He's also incredibly PERSISTENT when doing so!

We have had a couple of fieldtrips as well. One to the World forestry Center and another to the Portland Aquarium. and we have another fieldtrip coming up soon as well!

At the World Forestry Center

The girls and I had a Fire jumper competition to see who could "land" the closest to the fire with out landing in it...Kaitlyn won! She did a great job! Then the girls took a river trip...

We tried and tried to get Dominic to get in, but he was having none of it! at least until it was almost time to go. Then we did get him in and got a picture from the automated machine there.

At the Portland Aquarium...

Kaitlyn thought this guy was pretty cool! Then she discovered the rest of the place!

They had a ball! One of the touch tanks has small sharks and stingrays. The girls were so excited to touch them while Dominic was very silly! He didn't want to pet them, but it was okay if they petted him! So he would put his hand into the water and wait for the stingrays to swim by and brush up against his fingers. Then he would laugh and laugh and laugh! One stingray came up and a little out of the water against the wall and splashed him which he also though was fun and he tried to splash it back.
After that we headed up to the IKEA in Portland and bought Dominic a little kids bed so we could finally move him out of his pack and play bed. So far he seems to really enjoy it! and While we were there the girls found their "dream" room. So now that we have an idea of what they want for their room we can start slowly moving in that direction!
It's been an exhausting time, but we are starting to feel like we are actually accomplishing things again!